Creating a logo for your small business can be a fun and creative process. While I do love design, envisioning a concept, brainstorming with others and being part of the execution, developing a visual identity can also be stressful and expensive. A company’s brand is much more than just a graphic design; however, the logo often establishes a first impression for your business with potential customers. Our goals when we began the design process were to:
Earn trust with our customers
Create a logo representative of our service
Express our personality
Stay within budget
Where To Make A Business Logo
There are many design and marketing companies as well as freelancers you can hire to design your business logo. We chose to design a logo online using Canva, and we are very grateful we did.
The purpose of this blog is to show you how easy Canva made it for us to design our very first company logo. If you need more detailed information about why and what a company logo should look like, there are some excellent resources on the web about why a logo is important, the different colors to consider, and how a design fits into your company’s overall brand.
How Did We Choose Our Company Name?
Southpaw Essentials describes partly why we started this business. There are many ‘essentials’ required to accommodate left handers. If you’re right handed, try using your left hand to open a can or slice bread. Chances are you won’t even know where to find a left-handed can opener or left-handed knife.
Some of our stories on this website also explore issues teachers, parents and sports coaches need to consider with their left-handed children. We have also explored the differences between being a strong left hander and being either mixed dominant or even ambidextrous. These are all essential items and information to help understand left handers, unless we simply expect them to ‘adjust’ to a right-handed world, and how sad would that be, right? 😊
Southpaw was chosen for two main reasons. Baseball has been a major influence in my life and this term is very popular in describing people like me in that sport. And of course, the word means someone who is left handed.
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Designing A Logo On Canva
Now it was time to design a logo. I won an art contest when I was 5 years old, but it was a random draw😊 So, you know I’m not that artistic. I turned to my older sister (she was born one minute before me) and asked for her advice. She suggested Canva. Best advice she’s ever given me!
This design platform was easy to navigate. Here are the initial steps we took:
Click here to go to my Canva’s affiliated advertising home page. Hover your mouse over the ‘Templates’ drop-down menu and click on ‘Logos’ under the ‘Business’ column.
You will land on this page where you will find thousands of business logo templates to choose from. The video below is a screen record of our laptop to give you a quick idea.
We clicked on one of our favorite logos, which opened a new project for us. We changed the file name to ‘Southpaw Essentials Logo’ and continued selecting more samples from the menu on the left-hand side.
We scrolled through the templates on the left-hand side to find more sample logos. We quickly realized there were many professional and attractive designs. We chose about 15, including these 4:
We typed our company name into the selected templates. We also slightly adjusted some of the elements to give us more of a “left handed” look by positioning them so they would either be on the left side or pointing towards that direction:
What Color Should We Choose?
We researched why businesses choose certain colors for their design. Our team considered several shades of orange, blue, red, purple, and green. We’ll explain how we settled on our final look as we walk you through the design process on Canva.
We experimented with different colors:
While our team was quite pleased with these designs, there was a slight majority in favor of including a hand in the logo. We wanted something simplistic and recognizable. Our business focuses on laterality, so it made sense to us, and of course it had to be a left hand!
None of us liked the idea of this being the picture of a human hand, so we searched in Canva and found this hand under Canva’s poster template. Canva makes it easy for us to copy images and designs and place them where we choose. We rotated the hand and placed it on the left side of our company name.
Bonus Tip For Selecting Colors For Your Design
We were getting close to something we all liked. It was time to decide on color, mainly for the background with white font, and for the font on a white background.
We preferred blue. We went to Coolors and looked for different shades, copied a few Hex codes and pasted the respective 6-digit codes into Canva for each color.
We tested different shades, gradients, font, and image placement:
After a few tweaks, we settled on the following logo and font (League Spartan). We are proud of this logo and we accomplished this on our own, on a small budget, all thanks to the user-friendly Canva templates and design platform.
We also created two blue backgrounds without the logo, one of them in reverse. We used these for our website backgrounds.
To download a PNG or JPG file of your logo, you will need a Canva Pro (affiliated ad link) account. You can see in the video below we resized the file to 1,000 x 1,000 px for higher quality. We then downloaded a PNG file.
We also downloaded separate transparent files of both logos without the white and blue backgrounds in case we need to use them over video, or another color. To do this, you need one of Canva's default colors as the background. Therefore, as you can see in the video below, we:
replaced our customized blue background under the white logo with a Canva default color; we have two shades of blue so we needed to replace both with the same default color
we then went through the downloading steps by choosing PNG
we chose 'Transparent background'
in our case we also selected pages 1 and 2 since the other two pages in this file are our blue backgrounds without a logo
Is The Business Logo We Created On Canva Trademarked?
We do not have exclusive rights to this logo. Canva allows us to use their fonts in our logo, however graphics, in this case the hand, is a non-exclusive item and therefore we cannot trademark. Other Canva users are also able to use this element.
Designing a logo we could trademark was not a priority for us at this stage in our business We used Canva because it was affordable and easy to use. As we grow, we will use this initial design as inspiration for when we hire someone to create an original logo for Southpaw Essentials.
You can read more here about trademarking logos created on Canva as well as Canva’s licensing explained here.
So, if you want to get started by designing a logo on Canva, please let us know if you have any questions.
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